Multi-modal Project

Friday, March 28, 2008

My Writing Identity

My whole life I have felt like I was meant to tell a story. Although I am still in the research phase, I believe that my personal writing (both personal essays and day to day reflections) have helped me to create the background for whatever my story turns out to be. My identity as a writer has become most apparent through my blog. My blog allows me to express my individual writing style through my three biggest passions: writing, art, and music. Those three passions have helped me create my identity as a writer-- being able to tell my story through the inspiration I find from all of my passions.

On my blog, I write personal reflections of my day to day life, and also incorporate the personal essays, creative non fiction pieces, and other writing projects I have worked on through out college. I have also incorporated my photography and other art, into the blog that I have created. Through photographs I have taken myself and art work I have found online, I have in a sense “clothed my writing”. I have given it an identity through visuals along with text. The use of pictures and art accentuate the passion that I hope is apparent in my writing.

My creative fiction teacher at Penn State Altoona told me during our individual evaluations last year that I have “a unique way of expressing very complex ideas concretely.” It was the biggest compliment I have received about my writing. As a writer that is what I strive to do. It’s the idea of showing not telling. I hope that I can show exactly what I mean without having to use more words than necessary. I believe my eye for interesting photography and art also helps to “show and not tell” what I have to say as a writer.

In terms of theories, I believe that expressivism is an excellent way to classify my writing style. I write to uncover my story, to learn more about myself. Although I hope to someday write for a magazine and share my story with the world, to me, at least in this stage, writing is very personal. Through all of the aspects I have incorporated in my blog, I have found that I can learn more about my individual writing identity. I am also able to write continually, which marks my progress, and also helps develop my “authentic voice”. I am on a constant search to find the best way to tell my story, and I believe that is through my blog, a representation of my identity as a writer.

Enjoy!!

I believe that my blog does an excellent job of explaining my writing identity to the class. Because my writing identity encompasses so many other aspects of my life, I think it was important for me to show those aspects of my identity as they relate to my thesis. That is, showing my writing identity through my many passions, specifically photography, music, and art. My purpose with this multi-modal project was to show how all of those aspects make up my identity as a writer.

I hope that by viewing my blog the class can see how the photography, music, video, and art that I use along with the text helps to illustrate my writing identity. It also, I believe, characterizes the type of person that I am in general. Artistic, creative, and passionate about the different modes I used in my project. Because I show so much of my identity through the different modes, I think that it also provides credibility. The class is able to identify with my thesis by examining the other components of my blog. You can look at my music identity, and see how that tells part of my story, the same with the photography, and video aspects of the blog.
Hopefully, it is easy to see how all of the different identities tie together. I think that the different components of my blog address the different passions that I discussed in my thesis, which is tied together by using all of the aspects in the video at the end. The sequence illustrates that the individual identities wouldn’t tell as much about me as they do all together. If I didn’t have the video of my biopoem that uses art, music, and text, the class wouldn’t be able to fully appreciate my separate identities.

The most important aspect I was trying to convey with this multi-modal project was creating “my overall identity”. Like I stated in that part of the blog, I want to spend my life writing. I can’t separate my personal identity from my writing identity. That writing identity is made up of all of the creative aspects of my personality, as is shown on my blog. My Creative Fiction teacher at Penn State Altoona told me during our individual evaluations last year that I “have a way of explaining complex ideas concretely”. I’d like to think that is what my blog does as well.

As discussed in The St. Martin’s Sourcebook, I believe that my writing style most directly fits with Peter Elbow’s paradigm of Expressivism. My personal journey as a writer is expressed through the continuing progress of my blogging. Using all the different aspects in my writing helps me create my unique voice as a writer. My identity isn’t as much of a novel as it a child’s story book, explaining creatively and artistically all of the aspects that make up me. Just like a story book must have pictures to make the words come alive, I need that too, even as an adult writer. I hope the class finds that type of enchantment in my blog, the story that makes up my identity as a writer.

Multi-modal Project

Thursday, October 15, 2009

Friday, March 28, 2008

My Writing Identity

My Music Identity

My Photography Identity

My Multi-Modal Identity

About Me

What this all means, rhetorically...